Folding@Home

Creator: Stanford University

Folding@home is possibly the most successful GPGPU application at the moment, with ATI pioneering GPU-based folding years ago with its Radeon X1000 range of GPUs. Since then, folding has spread to the point where Nvidia has supported folding on all GPUs since its GeForce 8-series.

Folding is a client-based distributed computing application that simulates protein folding to aid our understanding of complex diseases such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow Disease (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. To add some interest to the furthering of scientific and medical research doesn't hold any interest for you, Stanford also has team- and user-based leaderboards, so folding is also a competition.

To fold on your GPU, visit the High Performance Client page and download the latest version. The client downloads work units (aka 'projects') from Stanford, and each work unit is worth a certain amount of points.

You can monitor your folding progress via the FahMon tool, which will calculate how quickly your card can get through the current work unit and extrapolates a points per day (ppd) figure. You can join the bit-tech and Custom PC folding team (currently ranked fifth in the world) by using the team number 35947. Your contribution is valued.





With ATI not having resolved the issue of under performance in Folding, we weren't expecting miracles here. The result of 2,866ppd is mediocre at best but we were dealing with a 511point project (P5732). Needless to say, if your graphics card's job description includes 'moonlighting at Folding' Nvidia still rule the roost in this department.

Power consumption on the whole was as expected although the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Vapor-X 2GB posted one of the highest idle results we've seen at 234W. Clearly the 2GB GDDR5 and overclocked core and memory have something to do with this but it was only 20W or so higher than the stock card. Things got a bit worse at load with 34W between it and the stock card but the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB Atomic drew a further 14W.